Daily Kos84%
Americans love this terrible idea to fix Congress 42%
By Andrew Mangan67%
7/19/2026, 11:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 36 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Appeal to Authority, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 22.5% saturation with 299 hits. Analysis detected 2,855 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,330 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 46.5% and a BS Rank of 42% (11,037 of 18,822 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 58.60% of the article peer group.
Americans love this terrible idea to fix Congress
Congress is out of touch.
It needs fresh blood.
There should be term limits.
Right?
Few policy ideas match the public support for congressional term limits.
Nearly 9 in 10 Americans back the idea, per a 2023 Pew Research Center study.
Other polls back up that finding.
As a result, lawmakers have put forth numerous bills seeking to amend the Constitution and restrict the number of terms to two in the Senate and between three to six in the House.
But the idea, if enacted, would hobble an already ineffective Congress.
First off, though Americans may love the idea of term limits, their view of Congress has little bearing on how long lawmakers have served.
Take, for example, the 97th session of Congress, which kicked off in 1981.
Its lawmakers were especially green.
The average years of service at the start of that session were 7.3 in the House and 7.5 in the Senate, according to data that Daily Kos compiled from the Congressional Research Service.
Those rank as the lowest average tenures in each chamber from the 1950s through today.
The average approval rating for that session was 33.5%, per Gallup data.
Meanwhile, the 100th Congress, which began in 1987, was more seasoned on average—9.0 years in the House, 9.6 years in the Senate—and pulled in a higher average approval rating, at 42.0%.
Looking at broader swaths of history reveals little relation between lawmaker tenure and the public’s approval of Congress, as well.
Across the 10 most recent sessions of Congress, the average years of service have been 9.2 in the House and 11.0 in the Senate, which is virtually identical to the 10 sessions before that (8.9 years in the House, 10.9 in the Senate).
However, Congress’ average approval rating across the 10 most recent sessions has been just 19.5%—less than half of what it was in the previous 10 sessions (40.0% on average).
Break out the past 25 sessions into five-session chunks and you find the same level of correlation, which is to say … very little.
For example, the five sessions beginning with the 100th and the five beginning with the 115th have essentially the same average years of service in both chambers—but Congress’ average approval rating is 10 points lower for the latter five sessions.
Of course, there are numerous examples of long-serving, out-of-touch politicians: your Mitch McConnells, your Chucks Grassley and Schumer.
Those are no doubt the types of politicians Americans are imagining when they say they support term limits (or maximum age limits, which do not currently exist in American politics and are outside of the purview of this article).
But who would replace them?
Democrats may have some promising upstarts, but on the Republican side, newer lawmakers tend to be more fervently MAGA—and alienating to most Americans, who do not support that movement.
Seasoned lawmakers are also generally more effective when it comes to, well, making laws.
After all, being a member of Congress is a job, and as with all jobs, experience matters.
When it comes to crafting legislation, greener lawmakers rely heavily on more experienced colleagues as well as lobbyists, both of whom often have a deeper understanding of the nitty-gritty of policymaking.
Remove those experienced lawmakers from the equation and Congress’ dependence on special interest groups would likely grow.
Worse, if lawmakers know their time is limited to a handful of terms, they have fewer reasons to learn to be effective.
“[W]hen you term-limit someone, you are effectively cutting out their incentive to invest in learning how to do the job, to delve into policy issues at the depth that they need to and to really dive into how the procedures work, which just takes years,” Casey Burgat, director of the Legislative Affairs program at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, told NPR in 2023.
“There’s no training program.”
By their very nature, term limits automatically jettison effective lawmakers.
Texas Rep.
Joaquin Castro was the most legislatively effective House Democrat in the 118th Congress, according to a study from the Center for Effective Lawmaking.
Despite Castro being a member of the minority party, “his approach of working behind the scenes—to strike compromises and insert his bill language in other legislative vehicles—shows further opportunities for minority-party lawmakers to succeed in Congress,” the study said.
Even the most generous term-limit legislation, with a six-term max in the House, would have barred him from running for his seat in 2024.
He was first elected in 2012.
In fact, a six-term max would have now kicked out six of the 10 most legislatively effective House Democrats in the 118th Congress.
A three-term limit would have booted all but one.
Altogether, those 10 most effective Democrats hold an average tenure of over 17 years.
Turns out, experience is pretty valuable.
The same is true in the Senate.
In the 118th Congress, six out of the 10 most legislatively effective Democratic senators had served or are now serving more than two terms—the typical maximum in term-limit legislation.
A two-term max would have forbidden Jon Tester, the fourth-most effective Senate Democrat in the 118th session, from running for and winning reelection in GOP-friendly Montana in 2018.
As it stands, though, Tester ran, won, and produced results.
There are numerous other problems with term limits.
Studies show they boost political polarization and even appear to hamper economic growth.
“To the extent that we are worried about perverse electoral incentives and poorly performing institutions, there are likely better solutions and reforms that do not sacrifice the desirable aspects of electoral accountability,” Anthony Fowler, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago, concluded in a 2024 review of the research on term limits.
Meanwhile, there is at least one better solution to boost electoral accountability and productivity in Congress.
It has similarly high levels of public support.
It doesn’t even require a constitutional amendment.
Ban gerrymandering.
Any updates?
Democratic candidates running in House and Senate races are overperforming in polls across the nation—with at least one exception.
In Washington’s 3rd District, Democratic Rep.
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who first scored a shock victory in 2022, lags Republican challenger John Braun by 1 percentage point, according to a new survey from Emerson College and the Northwest Progressive Institute.
Gluesenkamp Perez won in 2024 by roughly 4 points.
However, 11% of likely voters are undecided, and the poll’s margin of error puts a 4-point Gluesenkamp Perez victory in the realm of possibility.
Still, for Democrats, the poll shows that no seat can be taken for granted this year.
Call it trickle-down statistics: Trump is unpopular, and so is every member of his Cabinet.
A new poll from YouGov finds that not a single current member of Trump’s Cabinet has a net-positive approval rating.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the highest-performing Cabinet lackey, scores a net approval rating of -3 points.
In a three-way tie for last place, each with a net approval rating of -16 points, are Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Vibe check
In lieu of our regularly scheduled Vibe Check this week, I want to pay tribute to Denise Oliver Velez, who passed away on Wednesday.
Since I started at Daily Kos in 2023, I’ve had the privilege of editing many of her “Caribbean Matters” and “Black Music Sunday” columns.
They’ve introduced me to overlooked issues and great tunes.
I’ll be forever thankful for that.
Many in the Daily Kos community knew her far better than I did, and if you’re one of them, my thoughts are with you.
For any of you who might not be all that familiar with her, please check out her profile page and get to know an incredible woman through the more than 1,800 stories and 233,000 comments (!)
she wrote here.
And if you can, consider donating to the GoFundMe set up in her honor.
Analysis
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